"Harbor"

The protagonist, Abdelaziz "Aziz" Arkoun, is a young Arab man from
Arzew, a small coastal town in Algeria. Escaping the civil war, he
arrives in 2000 in Boston as an illegal stowaway on a tanker,
suffering terrible privation and second-degree burns, and jumps into
the cold waters of Boston harbor. There, he joins a small community
of fellow expatriates who have come similarly before him, living five
to a dingy apartment and doing odd jobs.

Aziz's mentor Rafik, who shares his apartment with Aziz, is originally
from his Algerian town. Rafik's apartment is also shared with his
American girlfriend and with other assorted Algerian refugees, who
mostly sleep on the floor of the leaky apartment.

Rafik is a slick operator; Aziz knows that "three-quarters of what
Rafik told him was false." Rafik's associate Kamal from South Boston,
who has lived for some years in Paris, is a crook. Rafik also has
several other shady associates who fly to Tunisia, Germany, and other
places, and there are stolen cameras, lighters, and other items that
are kept in a storage facility in Everett.

Aziz and the others deliver pizzas, work menial jobs in
restaurants, and eke out a living. They slowly learn the basics and
start to assimilate. They go about their lives, working hard, smoking
Marlboros, and trying to meet women at nightclubs. They often get
into intense conversations about the sorry state of their home country
and how Algerians have screwed it up, and speaking contemptuously of
jihadis as "mosque heads." Slowly we learn of Aziz's own traumatic
experiences in the army, and how he ended up deserting it and landed
into the full horror perpetrated by Algeria's Islamist groups as well
as by the military.

Having established our sympathy for Aziz and his fellow illegal
aliens, Adams next develops the case of the FBI and police who are
watching them in their hunt for terrorists. As the investigators tap
phones and obtain translations through their bureaucracy, they
stumble on unfamiliar names, puzzle over village ties, and misunderstand
straightforward relationships. As they coordinate activities with other
agencies and develop detailed, colored diagrams linking the various
suspects together, we quickly realize how wrong their conclusions are.
Adams, who won a Pulitzer prize for her Washington Post reporting on
similar FBI anti-terrorism investigations before 9/11, shows us how
well-intentioned American surveillance agents, who don't understand
the language or culture of their subjects, can hopelessly bungle their
investigation. Ultimately, the guilty go free while the hapless
innocents are arrested and either imprisoned or deported.

In this first novel, Adams lets us identify very powerfully with the
Algerian immigrants. She lends us a sympathetic hand and leads us
into their minds. Aziz not only has no English; he is also bewildered
by the culture and mannerisms he sees around him. He is confused by
the casual, ironic affect of people, of "this way that Americans had,
of being soft but hard; nothing difficult, nothing easy; nothing good,
nothing bad. It was a way of being that Aziz had no words for yet."
(He later learns that the term for it is "matter-of-fact.")

Gradually as we come to know Aziz, we come to understand him. This
feat of empathy that Adams has accomplished is an important antidote
for Americans' post-9/11 fear, which is based mostly on ignorance
about people who are not like us. When you can identify with
strangers, your knowledge drives fear away. The FBI special agent
leading the investigation, once she gets a chance to eavesdrop on an
English-language conversation, realizes too late that the people she
has been watching care for each other in a way one would expect: that
they are, in fact, just regular people looking for safe harbor.

Bibliography: (with links to Amazon.com)

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About the Author:

Lorraine Adams was educated at Princeton University and was a graduate fellow at Columbia University, where she received a master’s degree in literature. She won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and was a staff writer for the Washington Post for eleven years. She lives in Washington, D.C., and is at work on her second novel.